Lesson #1: Lock the door
At the time of this life instruction, my son Charlie was just over a year old. He was not yet walking, but was certainly mobile and lethally curious. My role was to feed and nurture his growth and to impede his lemming-like instincts as much as possible. Also, I was teaching fifth grade from my kitchen while a global pandemic, wildfire smoke, and racial violence clouded the air outside.
Most days, my husband and I would square dance around our apartment, occasionally hooking elbows and connecting in the middle but otherwise bouncing from room to room — him in the bedroom at the thrifted blue desk, me in the kitchen, propping my laptop up on an empty case of kombucha that Trader Joe’s gave me to carry my groceries that now doubled as a standing desk, Charlie pinballing from room to room. Around lunchtime, we would do-si-do. I would teach from the bedroom in the afternoon while he worked from the kitchen and Charlie got progressively more irritable and needy. At the end of the school day, Charlie and I would swing to another space to give my husband some time to catch up on emails. The pandemic was six months on, and for the most part, we had found a rhythm.
Some days, one or both of us would need to go out for work: to deliver supplies to students, to attend a training downtown, to drop off a laptop charger to a colleague, and the parent at home would continue doing their full-time job while providing childcare for a toddler. To my friends without kids, this sounded either totally fine or totally insane. We heard a lot of “That must be so nice, to have so much time together. What a great chance to bond!” Others asked how things were going in the voice you’d use if your friend had decided to build himself an ark. Those with children were less likely to be curious and more likely to offer condolence, and they never waxed poetic about the extra bonding time.
On this particular day, my husband was not home. His job occasionally required him to spend a day assembling kits that customers would take home with them, and the premise of assembling, packing, sealing, and addressing a hundred boxes with a crawler underfoot did not sound feasible to either of us, which is how Charlie and I found ourselves in the kitchen.
Our classes began at eight thirty. Here are all the things I remembered to do on this particular day:
- Get Charlie out of bed
- Dress him in clean clothes and a fresh diaper
- Make him a bottle
- Get out his snacks and put them somewhere within reach, preferrably not the floor
- Position the kitchen table so I could sit at my laptop and keep one eye on his movements
- Pee
- Make my own breakfast and coffee
- Put on clean clothes, including a bra and a belt
- Fan out an array of toys that might keep Charlie entertained
- Unplug any electrical appliances whose cord dangled low enough for him to pull on
- Silence my cell phone
- Breathe
(I hadn’t intended to include this list as I remembered this story, but it feels important now to remember that my batting average was pretty good by 8:30 in the morning)
Just before the start of class, my husband left for work. Charlie and I kissed him goodbye, shut the door behind him, and took a deep breath in our quiet kitchen. Then, I set Charlie down on the floor, sat at my computer, and started the video call. Students joined the call, and I welcomed them each by name. We chatted about our morning until the official start of the school day. I shared my screen and read through the schedule for the day. We moved to the next slide, a photo with which my students would practice sharing what they observed and what questions it brought up for them, while I recorded their thinking with a digital pen. Charlie puttered around, pulling open cabinets and taking all of their contents out onto the floor of the kitchen. So far, so good. I would have to hop up if he got out the saucepan or the cookie sheet and began to bang on them (which he usually did), but at the moment, he could play without my intervening, and that’s exactly what he did.
After our “see, think, wonder” routine each morning, our class reads an acknowledgement of the original Native caretakers of the land where our school is located. The first week of school, I would read the land acknowledgement to my students, and after that, I would ask a volunteer to read it aloud to us. James raised his hand and began reading the slide to the class. Having capped the virtual pen and transitioned into the role of listener, I realized the room had gotten quiet. Even a rookie like myself knows that quiet is usually a sign of trouble when there are children in your home. I scanned the room quickly and couldn’t see Charlie. There were the kid-friendly toys, untouched on the living room rug. There were all the pots and pans, the plastic bowls, the cutting board. And there, just beyond, was the open front door of our apartment. The one thing I couldn’t see was Charlie.
I bolted from my seat and ran to the door. By the time I realized what happened, Charlie had made it halfway down the hall in his frenetic, wobbly speed-crawl. The external door to our apartment building had a handle he couldn’t quite grasp, which was only the tiniest relief as I snatched up my child and ran back to the apartment. Once inside, I shut the door behind me and locked the dead bolt. I sat back in my seat seconds after James reached the end of the reading. Charlie began to cry, startled by the abrupt change in scenery, and I told my students to take a stretch break, regardless of the fact that school had only started ten minutes earlier.
I stepped out of my seat, laid on the floor, and cried. My husband was probably still on the freeway. I hadn’t made it ten minutes without my son escaping and almost becoming a missing person.
Having a child rewires your brain, and mine set to work, flipping through an infinite Rolodex of catastrophes that could have happened if I hadn’t looked up just then, if I had read the slide instead of asking James. I imagined Charlie making it to the parking lot and emerging from behind a parked car at the worst possible moment. I imagined him chewing on the cord for the vacuum that our maintenance person was using. I imagined him being squashed under someone’s foot like a bug. In a flash, I could see Charlie falling down the stairs, Charlie getting into a garbage bag and eating a toxic chemical, Charlie being picked up and spirited away by someone other than myself. I had let him leave our home. I couldn’t even keep him in the room with me.
This is the method my body uses to help me to remember to lock the door the next time I’m home with Charlie. And, in fact, this is the searing, branding method my brain uses to teach most lessons on parenting. Months later, Charlie was reluctant to take a bath, and I coaxed him in with extra water and lots of bubbles. In attempting to climb the side of the tub, he slipped and his head went underwater. He righted himself, cried, and went on playing with the toy zoo animals, while I sat on the closed toilet and imagined him blue, imagined CPR, wondered how many paramedics could fit in our tiny bathroom. He takes shallow baths now.
The toll of this stress on my body is visible, tangible. I am grateful to my body for being an effective teacher. Charlie has not escaped the apartment, has not drowned in the tub, has not electrocuted himself, has only fallen off our bed twice, and each of these protections were learned the hard way. My friends chuckle when we are together and someone tosses Charlie into the air. He shrieks with laughter, is airborne for just seconds, and my body floods with adrenaline like I’m Keanu Reeves on a speeding city bus.
Lessons learned:
- Every morning, Charlie wakes up smarter than the day before. Expect him to know how to do something he couldn’t do yesterday.
- Lock the front door, even if it’s the middle of the morning and you’re home and nothing dangerous is in your building.
- It is unrealistic to expect that you will be able to intervene before Charlie puts himself in danger 100% of the time. Occasionally, you will fail at this endeavor.
It is also completely natural to ruminate on a frightening moment after it happens.
Both are painful but neither are avoidable. - Even on a day when you forgot to do one big thing, there are a thousand other things that you got right. Your brain doesn’t need that information, but your heart definitely does.